Photo by Leon Ephraïm on Unsplash

In the world we live in today, it’s easy to condemn an entire company – in this case Fair Oaks Farm, one of the nation’s largest dairy farms – or an entire industry – in this case, farmers – when a revolting video of mistreatment of animals comes out. However, it’s not fair and it’s not right – especially when you may only be seeing one side of the story. Here are a few things I think are important to note regarding the Fair Oaks situation:

  • Animal Recovery Mission (ARM) is an animal rights organization with a very specific agenda to eliminate ALL meat and dairy products from everyone’s diets. (The bio of ARM’s founder says so right on its website.
  • ARM infiltrated Fair Oaks as employees and spent nearly TWO YEARS trying to capture footage of mistreatment of animals. I’d like to know why they didn’t they turn in their footage immediately to the authorities. It took a long time for this video to come out – during June is Dairy Month, coincidentally – and that’s pathetic.
  • While acting as ‘employees’, these ARM activists participated in and conducted acts of abuse they filmed.
  • Fair Oaks employees actually saw the abuse happening two months ago and turned in three of these employees – who were promptly fired. (The fired employees, by the way, had been through animal welfare training at Fair Oaks and signed an agreement that they would notify Fair Oaks of any mistreatment of animals immediately. Huh.) A fourth was fired immediately after the video was released.
  • If you know anything about Fair Oaks Farms, you know they welcome the public and want to be completely transparent about what it’s like on a dairy farm. They aren’t trying to ‘hide’ anything. And by all accounts, they’ve done everything they should be doing to fix this problem. Like most of us, they are sickened by the video footage too. In fact, you can view the latest Fair Oaks latest statement about what’s happening and what will change.

Here’s the deal … the video footage from Fair Oaks Farms was horrible and every single farmer I know would agree with me on that. Farmers aren’t evil human beings who want to purposely hurt their animals or see them suffer in any way. (The fact that I just had to type that sentence is ridiculous to me.) But as much as most of us in agriculture hate it, there are bad people in our industry … just as there are bad people working in any industry. But this is NOT the norm in animal agriculture, and farmers shouldn’t be judged by a well-orchestrated, at least partially staged video campaign from an organization with an agenda to ALL eliminate dairy and meat from the world.

There are two sides to this story. Right now, the negative side is getting all the publicity and social media shares. And I’m tired of it.  

2 Comments on The Fair Oaks Farms Situation

  1. Hello As I read thru your story I thought I should share with you. I live in Nebraska I am retired farmer. I have time to research. A couple years ago I found something interesting so I am on a mission about water. It has been here a long time and we have not taken very good care of it. A Japanese researcher, masaruemoto.com took pictures of frozen water crystals proving that water has memory. Isn’t that interesting. Since water has memory it remembers where it has been. When water flows down a mountain stream as it travels over and around the rocks it does what is called vortexing. This erases the memory of toxins in the water. There are thousands of chemicals every where that we did not have 40 years ago. A gentleman who was born in Minnesota by the name of Clayton Nolte who is now retired. He is a chemist, researcher and inventor has invented some reasonably priced units that mimic what happen in the mountain stream that would be beneficial in every household. One of the many things that it is is it is P/H neutral. Because of our “modern American diet” many bodies are acidic. This is an invitation to disease. We call it structured water. There is more I can share with you if this interests you. Water is more than H2O. Thank You, Richard

  2. Animal cruelty is wrong of course but what do city people think? You just tell cows what to do and they do it? Most of us would probably rather not know the details of how our food comes about.

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